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Obadiah Archer

Penultimate character from the Ninjak vs the Valiant Universe trailer, another unmistakable face (especially considering how accurate and comicbook-faithful the characters’ portrayal is in the upcoming web series). When we see Armstronglosing his patience and marching menacely towards an unseen adversary, there’s a young boy with a blue shirt by his side trying to calm him down: that’s Obadiah Archer, Armstrong’s inseparable partner. We don’t have an official name for the actor portraying him (yet), and as usual it’s unknown what kind of role he’ll have in the series, if he’ll only have a cameo, or he’ll actually take part to the fight…yes, he’d be more than able to. Let’s take a look.

Obadiah Archer was born somewhere in Kansas, the son of unknown parents. When he was still a child, he was adopted by Joe Earl Archer and his wife Thelma, a couple of pious philanthropists who were also esteemed political and religious leaders, renowned in their community for being generous and wise people, always ready to help the unfortunates such as poor baby Obadiah. The holy couple, however, was not as saint as it seemed. Obadiah was not the only adopted kid, as many others were taken for a purpose far more sinister than phinanthropy: the Archers were the leaders of The Dominion, a religious society part of a much larger and more ancient group, simply known as The Sect; as well as all the other children, Obadiah was raised since his childhood to be one of the group’s top assassins, trained in the use of weapons and in martial arts. As a kid, those trips to Adams County, Ohio, to the Dominion’s headquarter named the Promised Land, were fun for Obadiah, an occasion to spend some time with his lifelong friends, his adopted brothers and sisters, especially with Mary-Maria, whom she had a close bond with. Growing up, however, Obadiah became more and more convinced in the principles and values of the Sect, and his moral view on the world was molded accordingly to his parents’ one. Deeply committed in his training, he became an extremely skilled combatant, the best among his peers, a warrior of unrivaled skill; seeing how much their son had improved, the Archers finally revealed to him the one and true mission of the Dominion: to rid the world of a perverse devil haunting it since the dawn of time, an immortal creature they only called “the One Whose Name Is Never Spoken“. Obadiah firmly believed that the demon was evil incarnate, and he consecrated himself to his destruction. He was truly and deeply honored when, being the best warrior in the Dominion in generations, he was chosen for the mission to kill the devil, found and identified in New York City.

With a small arsenal and all his impossibly refined skills, Archer travelled to New York, where he was ready to finally confront the demon who had been haunting his nightmares since he was a kid…the devil himself, however, was quite different from what he had been expecting. Surely depraved and immoral, foul-mouthed and vulgar, the tramp-looking man he was pointed to had however nothing of the monster of evil and ferocity he had been told, quite the opposite, he was quite jovial and easy-going. Archer attacked the One Whose Name Is Never Spoken (albeit he himself spoke it quite a lot, and he introduced himself as “Armstrong”), but with the supernatural regenerative powers of Armstrong and the tireless determination of Archer, none of them was able to prevail. Tired from the fight, both combatants were attacked and imprisoned by a paramilitary army: the private militia of The Sect. While in prison, Archer realised one simple truth: the Sect didn’t want to protect the world from Armstrong, they just wanted The Boon, the powerful alien artifact that had given Armstrong his immortality, and that he had shattered into six pieces only he knew the location of. Finally understanding that his parents, the Dominion and the Sect were the truly evil ones, Archer sided with Armstrong, and together they broke free of their prison, defeating all the soldiers standing before them. Once outside, however, it was far from over: young and idealistic, now that he had realised who was good and who was evil, Archer wanted to free the world from the influence of evil sects in general, starting from the one that had created him. Armstrong, worried for the kid’s well-being and by now quite fond of the boy, decided to help him in his quest, and the two of them became an inseparable duo…not that it was easy for them to stay together: Armstrong was still a vice-lover party-man with no responsibility nor morality, while Archer was still a naive young man raised in an ultra-religious environment who mantained a puritan view over pretty much everything; adapting one to the other could be a far greater challenge than defeating the Sect…

Obadiah Archer is an idealistic and pure-hearted young man, who sees the world with an incredible innocence and naivety; raised in an extremist environment, he has no gray in his moral scale, and he despises vice and sin with all his strenght. Having being trained as a top assassin, Archer is one of the best martial artists in the world, a combatant with total control over his body and movements; he has a nearly infallible aim, both with firearms and with classic bow and arrow, but he’s particularly skilled with his trademark crossbow. A tireless warrior trained to erase evil from the world, Archer is doing exactly what he’s been taught to, rebelling to his “parents” and his former fellow cultists…balancing with his seriousness and innocence the irresponsibility and love for fun of his partner Armstrong.